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New Years Day Bake and traditional good luck dinner

New Years Day Bake and traditional good luck dinner

I just would not feel right without some black eyed peas on New Years Day. Fresh black eyed peas they say represents coins and the kale money...hummm sounds good and lucky to me.

This is my MIL real southern cornbread recipe..god bless her...I call it grandma Turner's cornbread. It has no sugar and no flour and is dropped into a hot skillet of bacon fat.

That's italian sweet sausage from my local butcher's in the soup. Also pictured is today's bake of sourdough loaves..the fourth one was in the oven. It was made into a round boule..to fill with cheese, like I saw on Farine's blog...yummm.

Grandma Turner's Cornbread

Preheat oven and 10" or 12" (I use 12" for single and double recipe) inch frying pan with bacon drippings in a 400F oven.

2 cups white or yellow corn meal

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

2 cups buttermilk

2 eggs

4 to 6 TBsp. of veg oil or bacon drippings - add some or all in the pan. I add about 6 TBsp. full and put the pan into a hot 400F oven - removing about 3 TBsp. to go directly into mixed batter.

Very lightly stir the mixture and pour into pre-heated hot iron pan. It will sizzle when it hits the hot bacon drippings. I used a 12" pan. This recipe can be doubled if using a the large 12" frying pan. The corn bread I have pictured is not a double recipe.

You don't have to do the hot skillet and drippings..if you do..use caution, everything is very hot! You can just add veg. oil or melted butter to your batter and pour it into a well seasoned and greased heated frying pan. I used all hot bacon drippings in this bake. I also like using melted butter in the batter and then pouring the batter into hot bacon drippings in the iron pan.

Bake for apx. 20 mins. The bread will come away from the sides of the pan and start to crack a little..that's good sign it's done!

Photo for fun and interest. We burn a lot of oak around here, but not this one.

I saw this on a television show the other day. It's the US largest oldest living Oak Tree. Less

than 50 miles from me. It has quite a history about the land it's on in Temecula, CA.

Comments

that there were traditional foods for New Years. That all looks great. I love cornbread, and have never baked it in a skillet. I so want to try your MIL's recipe. Thanks so much for sharing. And great tree. -Varda

The ingredients are not in exact measures, but the taste can be adjusted to your likings..it's pretty hard to mess up. This is way it was written down by me years ago. Watch you don't get a bitter taste from to much baking powder..and shake up your buttermilk good. It freezes wonderfully.

One of the best recipes for cornbread I've ever run across Sylvia, thanks for sharing this and it'll be saved to favourites in short order. I like that it doesn't have sugar or flour and love that it uses bacon drippings. Next time I fire up the Q for some ribs or pulled pork shoulder your MIL's cornbread will definitely be on the menu as well.

The ingredient measures are written down from my copy of years ago. They could be changed with to metric..but I kind of like them they way they are...old southern recipe. They say the real southern cornbread never contains sugar or flour. My MIL often made dressing with this cornbread (we never ate dressing with bread in it, until we moved out west, I still like dressing best without bread in it : ) I remember my mother's comment about bread dressing 'lol') she served it with roasted tender chunks of beef or pork, gravy, mustard or turnip greens...she always had a potato salad too...I remember I always enjoyed the pot. salad, but missed my mashed potatoes. I was raised, if you didn't have mashed potatoes on the table, it wasn't a meal. The cornbread freezes great. I enjoy it most with my chicken okra gumbo and brown rice.

And I've eaten lots of it made just like that, but with flour and no buttermilk! My grammy was from Missouri and my mother always made cornbread when we were short on flour and eggs, it was quick too, in comparison to making a loaf of bread! We almost always had it with beans of some sort, Lima, kidney, small red beans, pinto, whatever there was in the cupboard, you could tell what was for supper when you walked in the door after school, the scent of cooking beans hit you, and you just knew cornbread was going to be made.

No one up here ever saw many black eyed peas, and my aunt was sorely dissapointed to get some seed one time and they weren't round, she rememberd them as being peas not beans, she also said the taste wasn't the same, I wouldn't know never having eaten them, but they are one tradition that never made it here.

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